Chicago Teen Kenneka Jenkins Found Dead in Hotel Freezer

There was no official cause of death announced immediately.

The black teenager found dead in a Chicago area hotel storage freezer over the weekend was raped before she died, according to users on Twitter Monday morning. That account seemingly conflicts with those from her friends and local police, which found Kenneka Jenkins frozen early Sunday morning about 24 hours after her friends said the 19-year-old went missing, the Chicago Tribune reported Monday morning.

Jenkins was with friends at a party in a hotel room in the nearby suburb of Rosemont, Illinois, before she went missing. Afterward, friends said they left her in a hotel hallway while they went to retrieve some belongings they left behind. When they came back, they said Jenkins was gone.

Her mother told the Tribune that she wasn’t sure what to believe because Jenkins’ friends’ “stories changed over and over.”

In the hours since the article was published, a Facebook Live video went viral showing another woman who was allegedly filming from the hotel room in question. Black Twitter users insisted that various excerpts from the video suggested Jenkins was being raped in another part bob the room as the footage was being streamed.

Police have said Jenkins was drunk, as shown by hotel footage that showed her staggering around the hotel lobby early Saturday morning. That was before she allegedly found the freezer and let herself in, where she would be found frozen to death hours later, police said.

But Jenkins’ mother disputed that account, insisting that if her daughter was drunk there would be no way she ever could have pulled open the freezer doors.

“Those were double steel doors, she didn’t just pop them open,” Tereasa Martin told the Tribune.

While details were scarce, it was likely that more facts surrounding the case would come out sooner rather than later, which would probably be due in no small part to social media.

Martin blasted police for their apparent lack of urgency in trying to find her daughter.

“If they had taken me seriously and checked right away, they could have found my daughter much sooner and she might have been alive,” she told the Tribune.